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| Sunday, October 24, 2004 |
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Five years later, the train pulls into Madison Avenue 
| | Larry Light, global chief marketing officer at McDonald's, once again publicly declared the death of the broadcast-centric ad model: "Mass marketing today is a mass mistake." McDonald's used to spend two-thirds of its ad budget on network prime time; that figure is now down to less than one-third. |
| | General Motors' Roger Adams, noting the automaker's experimentation with less-intrusive forms of marketing, said, "The consumer wants to be in control, and we want to put them in control." Echoed Saatchi & Saatchi chief Kevin Roberts, "The consumer now has absolute power." |
| | "It is not your goddamn brand," he told marketers. |
| | This consumer empowerment is at the heart of everything. End users are now in control of how, whether and where they consume information and entertainment. Whatever they don't want to interact with is gone. That upends the intrusive model the advertising business has been sustained by for decades. |
| | This is still fucked, of course. Advertising is one thing. Customer relationships are another. |
| | "Consumer empowerment" is an oxymoron. Try telling McDonalds you want a hamburger that doesn't taste like a horse hoof. Or try telling General Motors that nobody other than rental car agencies wants to buy a Chevy Cavalier or a Chevy Classic; or that it's time, after 60 years of making crap fixtures and upholstery, to put an extra ten bucks (or whatever it costs) into trunk rugs that don't seem like the company works to make them look and feel like shit. Feel that "absolute power?" Or like you're yelling at the pyramids? |
| | Real demand-side empowerment will come when it's possible for any customer to have a meaningful — and truly valued — conversation with people in actual power on the supply side. And those conversations turn into relationships. And those relationships guide the company. |
| | I'll believe it when I see it. |
| | Meanwhile the decline of old-fashioned brand advertising on network TV (which now amounts to a smaller percentage of all TV in any case) sounds more to me like budget rationalization than meaningful change where it counts. |
| | Thanks to Terry for the pointer. |
On the continuing end of advertising as usual
Blogland security
The most modest man in Silicon Valley
| | Just noticed I got photo credit in this story about my friend Tony, who lets his inventions do his talking for him. |
Wag the Insult Comic Dog
Scary
| | NO AL-QAEDA, NO TERRORISTS, NO CRIME says the junk mail from Grady Lynn (gradylynn.com) promoting a house near Nashville. $795,000. The same property in Santa Barbara or Woodside would go for $5+ million. Plus all that terror and crime. |
Blanding
| | More on the subject from Chuq, Hugh and Scoble. Here are my comments in response to Chuq's remarks, which for some reason were "not allowed" when I tried to post them there... |
| | Would Apple ever encourage blogging about the company by its employees? |
| | If the answer is no, it's because Apple is much better at branding than companies like Sun and Microsoft, which encourage blogging. |
| | And that's *not* a knock on Apple. It's just that there is clearly an inverse relationship between branding (of the sort P&G and Apple practice) and blogging (of the sort Microsoft and Sun practice). |
| | Which was my point in the first place. |
| | We can try all we like to nice-up and otherwise modernize (conversatonalize?) the word "brand"; but its origins will always be with us. And there was nothing conversational about those. |
A neutron bomb against stupification
Has a ring to it
discuss
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